


CROWN PRINCESS OF OBLIVION

by iceblinks



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: F/M, Horses, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Post-Calamity Ganon, Sort Of, link cuts zelda's hair, oh did i mention there are horses, post-BOTW
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:20:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28084581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iceblinks/pseuds/iceblinks
Summary: Link has the body of a willow tree and a face like water. When Zelda first saw him again, past the ash and the dust and the remains of the Calamity, he was smiling.“Will you cut my hair?”
Relationships: Link/Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 75





	CROWN PRINCESS OF OBLIVION

Zelda notices her split ends on the Friday after Link saves the world a hundred years too late. They are on horseback, riding side by side across the plains, and Link keeps stealing glances at her like he’s not sure she’s really alive. Zelda is not sure she’s really alive. She has spent a hundred years apart from a body she wanted nothing from. Now she is back in these hands, in these knees, seventeen and unable to sit still. A reunion dinner for one. 

“My hair,” Zelda says. Link sneaks another glance at her, reins draped loosely over his hands. “It’s long, isn’t it?”

Link shrugs. 

“I’ve never had it short before,” she says. The tips of her hair have split apart into smaller ceremonial waterfalls, branching and tangling against the backs of her hands as she runs them through. “Not since I was small.”

Link shrugs again. What do you want me to do, he says. 

“Cut it. Maybe.”

* * *

It’s a stupid thing to fixate on, sure, but Zelda has had her fair share of fixations. When she was younger and still starry-eyed, she’d dreamt herself a fairy tale. She was a different princess depending on the time of day, and her father got the castle seamstress to sew her different outfits for each one. She carried storybooks around the garden and spoke of princes and knights like religion. She was happy.

Then, knowledge. She had fancied herself a scholar; not out of a fit of teenage rebellion, but because she had been genuinely interested in what the ancient texts had to offer. Running a kingdom, not so much. 

Now, her hair, because little else was salvaged from the battlefield. She runs her hands through it while she talks and watches Link watch her. She thumbs her split ends while she thinks. She tells herself that a time like this leaves no room for fantasy, and faces the fire. She touches the tips again. 

I can cut it, Link says. He’s been watching her. It seems like he’s always watching her, now. Like he can recall every little detail he’s forgotten if he stares for long enough. 

“Really?”

Sure. 

“I have a blade.” 

Link hands her a baked apple and a handkerchief. Later, he says. The apple is still warm when Zelda touches it through the cloth. 

“Link,” she says. She pulls her cloak tighter around her shoulders. “What did you think of fairy tales, when you were younger?” 

Is this a trick question?

“No. Just wondering.”

I didn’t think much about them, probably, he says. He rolls a log towards the fire and pokes at it with a tree branch until it is immersed completely in flames and fish bones. 

“What did you think of your father?”

Link shrugs.

“Do you think of him?”

...He died.

“Yes.”

I don’t know. I can’t remember.

“I suppose that makes two of us, then.”

At this, Link looks up from the flames. There is a crease between his brows that she desperately wants to smooth out with her thumb. He asks, softly: you don’t remember your father?

“I don’t know. Maybe if I tried hard enough, I would. I—” Zelda sighs, scuffing at the dirt with her shoe. “I know who he was, and I know what he did. I just…can’t remember him doing it.”

Link frowns. After a moment, he offers her a hand up. 

They make quite a pair, don’t they, she muses. The both of them outcasts in their own land, the both of them remnants of a calamity so disastrous it nearly tore the universe to pieces. Both too little, too late. Both entrenched in their own personal Armageddon, contained in the knife-end of a blade promised to save a world on the verge of destruction.

Ganon was lucky, Zelda thinks sourly. He will not have to live with the fallout. He will never have to experience the carnival nightmare that hangs like a weighted shadow from her ankles. She stumbles in her tracks, jade princess, jaded princess—she is not a scholar, or a rebel, or a savior. She is a medallion. She is a consolation prize. 

Link catches her by the arm. 

Are you okay, he asks. He’s frowning again, and Zelda rights herself before reaching out and smoothing down the space between his eyebrows. He looks down at her and frowns harder.

Are you alright?

How can I be alright, she wants to ask. Nothing about this is alright. She is a medallion of a bygone era. Her only trait worth noting is that she shines like midday sun. Still useless, even now. 

“I don’t know.” She smiles, and her lips hurt from the strain. “Will you cut my hair?”

* * *

Once, before the Calamity, Zelda had asked Link if he would willingly die for her. Not for the sake of the kingdom, not for the sake of either of their fathers—but for her, specifically. If he would lay down his life if she gave the call.

Of course, Link had said. I took an oath, Zelda. I took an oath.

You’re missing the point, she’d said, frustrated. Forget the oath. Forget the kingdom. Would you— 

I took an oath, he said, his eyes trained on the embroidered rug beneath their feet. The rug told a story, as did all rugs at the time. The rug spoke of fairy tales. The rug spoke of vengeance. 

Okay, Zelda said. Okay. You took an oath.

* * *

“You took an oath.”

I did?

“Yes. To protect me. You were my knight, specifically. Shining armor and all.”

Impa told me. 

“Yes, well. You swore to my father that you would keep me from harm at all costs.”

Link weighs his horse’s bridle in his hands. His horse is tied to a tree, chewing its way through an apple core. Zelda’s horse chews mutinously at its own rope. She wonders idly if either horse has ever experienced a fate worse than death. 

I guess I couldn’t keep the promise, then, Link says dryly. You saved me, in the end. 

“I suppose I did.”

Thank you.

“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t.”

He looks up, startled.

“If you had saved me,” Zelda says slowly, fingers tapping at her elbows, “if it had been you in front, that time, I never would’ve—”

She lifts a hand up. Her wrist is limp, half of a puzzle piece, the curve of it highlighted in fading moonlight. The sun will come up, soon, and the sky is already fading from indigo to warm purple. “I never would’ve found this. Found myself.”

I remember, Link says. 

“I know.”

I’m glad you found what you were looking for.

“I’m not sure I am.” Zelda looks away, past the plains and into whatever comes after. She can no longer remember the names of the kingdoms beyond her own. “I brought Hyrule down with me. I brought the world down. I don’t think I can ever forgive myself for that.”

Link drops the saddle.

* * *

Link has the body of a willow tree and a face like water. When Zelda first saw him again, past the ash and the dust and the remains of the Calamity, he was smiling. 

For all he had known, there could have been a third Ganon, or a fourth, or a fifth. But he was smiling anyway, with a ray of sunlight nocked in his bow and sixteen more in his quiver. He had been smudged with dirt and rain and exhaustion. And yet here he was, still alive, paying reparations. Here he was in the place where all times converge in on themselves, where good people and bad people and all people in between go to die. 

Neither of them is a hundred years old. Zelda spent her time in a half-remembered cocoon of darkness; Link spent his inside a shallow pool of water. The both of them submerged, stripped down to the barest shadows of themselves: boy, girl, blue. 

* * *

She had felt it, that day, even though she was too far away and not yet corporeal. His mouth, the shape of it almost abstract; his voice cleaved down the middle. 

“ZELDA!”

* * *

A willow tree. The bridle on the ground. Blue eyes. 

“Zelda,” Link says hoarsely, maybe a little desperately, and the sun bursts over the horizon behind him in a clean, even line. “Let me cut your hair.”

* * *

She gives him her knife. If she squints, she can see the century-old scars on the backs of his hands. 

“Have you ever cut hair before?” She asks. She sits down on a fallen log, and he kneels behind her. 

“No.” His hands come up to her temples. He pulls her hair back in one fluid motion, brushes it carefully behind her shoulders. Zelda wonders where he’d learned to do this.

“Did someone teach you?”

“No.” There is something lodged between the cracks in his voice. He clears his throat. “No one.”

She sighs, leans back a little. His hands are on her temples again, brushing stray hairs carefully behind her ears. 

“Good.”

“Zelda,” he says. This is probably the most she’s ever heard him talk. “This might end badly.”

“That’s okay.”

His hand rests on the back of her neck. “How short do you want it, then?” 

She touches two fingers to the back of his palm. Her head spins. “Here,” she says. “Right here.” 

“Okay.” 

He pulls away first. Picks the knife back up. Gathers her hair in one hand and then lets it go. 

“I missed you,” Zelda says. She can feel the blade pulling at her follicles. Link steadies her head, presses three cold fingers to her jaw. This, she remembers. This is how it feels to be alive. “Though I think…I think you probably knew that already.”

Her skin burns when Link pulls away. She hears him take a deep breath in, and upon his exhale, the blade begins its back-and-forth procession through a hundred years’ worth of deliverance. Zelda keeps her head still. 

“I never told you. There was a garden in the castle. It used to be my mother’s, and I would go there after she—well.

“Sometimes, when it got rough with Ganon, I would try to check if it was still there. I could almost see it, you know. I could almost reach out and touch it. It was all dead for the first few decades, but I looked back later and I’m almost certain there were hyacinths, and chrysanthemums, and…”

A lock of hair falls over her shoulder and into her lap. She reaches for it, but Link makes a small noise of dissent and she freezes again. 

“If it’s still there,” she says, when the blade resumes its sawing, “if it’s still there, I’d like to see it again.”

The last of her hair falls into her lap. She can feel the shorter strands already curling up around her cheeks. 

“Is it done?”

Link hums. 

“Can I see?”

He hands her the blade and steps over the log. His hands, when she looks down, are covered in her hair. Thin, even strands, doused in the midafternoon sun, twice dead and still glowing. Zelda examines herself in the metal eye of the knife. She can’t see anything. 

“I can’t see anything,” she declares, slipping it back into its cover. 

Link shrugs. He picks the stray strands off of his wrists and presents her with a dead, straw-colored bouquet. The weight of all of Hyrule. The weight of her own failure. 

“What am I supposed to do with it?” 

He shrugs again. “What am _I_ supposed to do with it?” 

Keep it. Like a medallion. Like a promise. Like a storybook, lodged in between the bricks of a secret indoor garden. Like a prayer. 

“Leave it, then,” Zelda says. “It’s just hair, anyway. It’ll grow back.” 

Link lets his hand go slack, and together they watch as Zelda’s hair scatters with the wind. An eye for an eye, she thinks, watching the barely-there part of Link’s mouth. Ganon for her soul. For the one boy who had never seen her as a failure. 

Maybe in another world she tells better jokes. Maybe in another world she did what she was told. Maybe in another world she was not the heir to an already completed murder mystery. But in this reality, Link touches even the most dead parts of her like something precious. Like she was made for more than a legacy of oblivion. 

So Zelda runs a hand through her hair, huffing out a surprised laugh when her fingers catch on air instead of split ends. Link brushes his hands off on his trousers and looks up at her, watching carefully as she touches the blunt edges again, and again, and again. 

“Link.” She turns around, lets her hair fan out around her. Fuck it. Fuck it all. Ganon is sealed and the world ended a hundred years ago and she is finally, _finally_ seventeen again. “How is it?”

“I think you’re lovely,” Link says.

* * *

One hundred years after the end of the world and they’re still there. This is a second chance. Maybe this time the world will treat them kindly. 

Link catches her by the wrist as she’s walking towards her horse. 

“You’re not a failure.” A pause. “You didn’t end the world.” Pause. “You didn’t kill your father.” 

His voice is scratchy. His hair burns gold in the sunlight. People would probably get on their knees if he asked them to, would offer their lives up in an instant. 

“We’ve got time, now,” he says. “We have time.”

Then again, Zelda had stepped in front of Link with the sole intention of saving him. Even if it had meant her own head. Even if it had meant her body would be blown to bits across the ballroom floor, that the rest of the world would dance over her grave for all of eternity. 

This isn’t predestiny. This isn’t even a reunion dinner. This is what happens when you’re seventeen and the boy you’ve loved for more than a century tells you your worth. When he tells you you’re lovely. When he cuts your hair. 

“Yes,” she agrees. Link’s hand falls from her wrist to her palm and stays there. “We have time.”

**Author's Note:**

> how's it going folks...i haven't written anything besides haikyuu since like june so this was an interesting ride
> 
> i haven't played aoc yet but i killed ganon in botw for the first time a few weeks ago and i was like. hey. i can write about things now. let's do it. kind of a stupid thing to do because i was literally in the middle of finals week when I wrote this...apparently i can only write under pressure
> 
> i wasn’t really sure how to write link talking. i was like “let’s make him say something” and then i was like “wait no” and then i was like “wait no but actually yes” and so for some of this he talks but not in quotations. pretty sexy of him i'd say
> 
> alright. hope you're doing well. leaving comments/kudos/boxed apple juice is optional but it boosts my ego by 120%. goodnight


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